Quote:
Originally Posted by starrigger
I won't debate whether or not you should believe that Macmillan will do what they say. We'll all find out together.
But their announcement was pretty clear: Most new titles out in hardcover would be priced at $14.99. Prices would be lowered as lower-priced paper editions are released, to bottom out at $5.99 to $6.99.
|
Quite so. Even taking that at face value, though, that announcement didn't address the question of what happens to the prices of
existing e-books. Possibilities are two:
- The agency model only applies to books published after Agency-Day, and anything Amazon was selling before A-Day will continue to be sold under the old agreement. This would be so idiotic on so many levels that I'm reluctant to rule out the possibility entirely.
- The agency model applies to everything, both new and existing titles.
In the latter case, we have a new question: what happens to the prices of the books currently on sale? Possibilities are three:
- Right now somebody at Macmillan is going through their e-book catalogue with a copy of the new pricing model in one hand and a blue pencil in the other (or at least creating an algorithm to do same), updating prices to bring them into line with the new model. When Jeff Bezos' hunchbacked assistant throws the Great Big Knife-Switch in the Amazon server room on A-Day everything gets updated with the new price.
- Even if Macmillan actually
have a new pricing model, their attention is too focused on other things to update the list prices on their backlist. When noises start to be made asking why
last week's best-seller is selling for $30 but
this week's is selling for $14.99 this will be blamed on the transition from one model to another, and vague promises will be made promising the matter will be examined. Adjustments will be made over time, starting with recent bestsellers, then working into the backlists of current bestselling authors. Midlist authors' backlists may, eventually, get examined. Or may not, if a decision is made that it wouldn't be cost-effective to do so.
- Nothing at all, on the assumption that in six months nobody will even remember the title of today's bestseller, much less how much it was on sale for.
Keep in mind that this is all separate from what happens to the price of new bestsellers. We could easily end up in a situation where next January's bestseller starts at $14.99 and drops to $5.99 by Christmas, but a ten year old midlist title stays $25 forever.
Quote:
|
Edit: I had never noticed the Digital List Price on the Kindle listings. My bad. I suppose if I had a Kindle, I would have paid more attention to that.
|
I own a Kindle and don't recall ever having seen it before. Then again I don't shop at the Kindle store all that often, so it may have been there all along but I never noticed, since I never had any reason to care what the "Digital List Price" was.